Sabrina Frederick has revealed there were an incident on SAS Australia where the TV show’s villain Firass Dirani made her cry.
The sportswoman has opened up about the brutal reality of working on the show, with the program’s instructors calling her “extremely impressive” and “phenomenal”.
Frederick admitted though that her strength was constantly tested by Dirani due to a series of comments he made to her throughout filming.
“When you live with complete strangers in that environment, emotions are high anyway, so I’ll precursor with that,” Frederick said.
“However, I just have never been forced to live with someone that just constantly was … I don’t know … I can’t even explain … constantly doing things to get us in trouble.
“Personally, he would just say one-line comments to me every day,” she explained.
“I’m an emotional person. Don’t get me wrong, I look like a hard a**e on the show but I’m a very emotional person and a caring person and for me, I couldn’t understand why he was saying the things that he was saying to me.”
Dirani’s comments became too much at one point and Frederick admits she burst into tears.
“Just on that one day he got me, and I just lost it,” she said.
“I’m a very honest person with my emotions and of course I don’t want to cry on camera but at the same time that’s how I felt at the time.
“It’s an interesting relationship between me and him – we just didn’t get on.”
Frederick said what she thinks frustrated her most about the actor was “he was so adamant that he hadn’t done anything wrong the whole time, that put me in a shock.”
“I’m so used to being in a team environment where you take responsibility. I couldn’t understand why he would say things and just disregard them or say he didn’t say those things or that he didn’t do things to make us get punished. I’d be in disbelief that I could even hear that come out of his mouth.
“I think that’s what tipped me over the edge,” Frederick said.
“It wasn’t so much the action; it was more the complete disregard for those actions that I think tipped me over.”
The AFL player said that Dirani did apologise for upsetting her, but added she wasn’t convinced it was genuine.
“It took a while for him to apologise and I don’t know if he apologised to me because he meant it or because someone told him to, I don’t know,” she revealed.
“But by the time he did apologise, for me personally, it didn’t mean anything. I even said, ‘I appreciate your apology but just so you know, I don’t believe you.’
“I’m a really straight up honest person and I needed him to know that.
“I feel like not many people in there actually told him how they had felt from his actions, I think they shied away from it. For me it was a real opportunity to say, ‘look, this is what you’ve done and you’ve upset me,’ but I didn’t get the response that I wanted,” she said.
This article originally appeared on Over60.